The term nervous breakdown has been changed by the American Psychiatric Association's Naming Committee. The correct term is Dissociative Mental Break.
Unknown to most people in the mental health field, designers and engineers accidentally discovered the cause of most of these events.
Other answers are the current beliefs of experts in psychology and psychiatry. But the cause of these mental events has not been proved. Explanations involving stress are someone's opinion based on observation. No one has the ability to "open the box, mind," and look in to determine the cause.
__________
Workers using the first close-spaced office workstations began having mental breaks. Upon investigation the problem was Subliminal Distraction caused by the subliminal detection of threat movement to effect a peripheral vision reflex.
The office cubicle solved that problem after 1968.
Cubicles are designed to block side or peripheral vision when a worker enters the workstation to perform office duties. A state of full mental investment is necessary to perform Knowledge work. To maintain that concentration we must ignore vision reflexes. But we can't stop 'subliminally seeing' threat movement and we can't tell our brain not to attempt a vision reflex.
Psychology lectures in the 1990's explained that a conflict arose in the mind then built to mental break.
The designers and psychologists had found a conflict of physiology related to the vision "startle reflex". They did not understand what they had discovered. It was only applied to designing the business office. They thought they were the first to cause these small mental breaks.
But this problem has always been present anytime those special circumstances were created through human history. An incident aboard the Belgian Polar Expedition, 1898/99, had already happened. Jumping Frenchmen of Main had been discovered and evaluated, 1880. Cabin Fever, a sudden mental event where one cabin-mate violently attacks others, had been noted during the fur trapping period in the United States.
Culture Bound Syndromes involving dissociation and psychotic episodes are the same mental events happening around the world.
The phenomenon is so simple that it can be proposed as a cause of mental illness through history.
Posted from VisionAndPsychosis.Net by the author.
http://VisionAndPsychosis.Net/
